AA-CT 1 Governance Status of Artificial Agents Under Standing and Admissibility

This paper establishes a negative boundary condition on artificial agency: artificial systems cannot possess governance-relevant standing under admissibility. It proves that no artificial agent—regardless of capability, autonomy, learning capacity, or behavioral sophistication—can satisfy the conditions required for standing preservation, and therefore cannot be a legitimate bearer of governance status, authority, or responsibility. The result is structural and eliminative. The paper does not propose governance frameworks, regulatory models, or oversight mechanisms for artificial systems. Instead, it shows that treating artificial agents as subjects of governance commits an illicit category error by assigning standing where none can exist. Apparent agency, accountability, or role attribution is shown to arise from surrogate criteria such as performance, coherence, or functional substitution rather than admissible standing. The analysis blocks a class of claims in which artificial systems are framed as governable actors—capable of obligation, refusal, delegation, or responsibility—within institutional or legal contexts. It demonstrates that such claims rely on implicit continuity, identity, or authorship assumptions that collapse under standing analysis. This work is purely boundary-setting. It introduces no operational definitions, no enforcement logic, and no deployment guidance. Its contribution is to delimit the governance status of artificial systems by clarifying what they cannot be, rather than prescribing how they should be managed or controlled.